Today’s Democrats are going full John Kerry.
Much as the haughty, French-looking Massachusetts Democrat was in favor of the Iraq War before cravenly coming out against it, Democrats were always in favor of “democracy” before they turned against it.
It’s a republic, but whatever.
What’s really roiling the Democrats, though, is that the Republicans are giving them a taste of their own gerrymandering medicine.
Yes, it’s true that the Party of Zohran Mamdani and Jasmine Crockett continues to plumb new depths of unpopularity. But it’s also true that the Democrats know their only hope of opposing Donald Trump this time around is to retake the House in next year’s midterms. If they do, pop goes the Trump agenda — gavels, purse strings, subpoena power, articles of impeachment, the works.
Enter Texas Governor Greg Abbott, whose gloriously red state of Texas is moving forward with a mid-decade redistricting plan that will likely yield five more Republican congressional seats — which, in a series of 435 local elections of which only a relative handful are hotly contested, might well make the difference between Speaker Mike Johnson and Speaker Hakeem Jeffries.
Let that settle in.
For the opposition, I bring you former Congressman Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke, the perennially failed political candidate of the Lone Star State, who called on his fellow Democrats to “f*** the rules” so long as it helps his side win. Lighten up, Francis.
“After months of inertia and disunity in response to Trump,” reports the unintentionally comical UK Guardian, “Democrats are now finding their voice and taking a stand. Democratic state legislators from Texas fled their home state to deny Republicans a quorum and prevent a vote on the proposed new map.”
In other words, Democrats are “taking a stand” by running away.
“Donald Trump is trying to steal the 2026 election,” bleated the Oleaginous One, California Governor Gavin Newsom, whose state currently awards the Republicans a measly 17% of its House seats despite the GOP having won 40% of the vote in the (once) Golden State. What would a fairly representative California mean to House Republicans and the national political balance of power? Twelve more congressional Republicans, that’s what.
Newsom knows this, and he nonetheless wants to call a special election to further gerrymander his state — which seems sort of implausible given how out-of-whack it already is. Newsom wants to throw out the congressional maps that were recently redrawn by an “independent” Citizens Redistricting Commission, and doing so just might result in a voter backlash. So have at it, dude.
Indeed, one Democrat after another is slowly coming to realize that representative democracy itself is the very thing that’s threatening their return from the hinterlands and kicking their butts up one side of Pennsylvania Avenue and down the other. Which is why they seem hell-bent on destroying that fundamentally Western institution in order to, uh, save it.
Consider the recent caterwauling of Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, who called Texas Governor Greg Abbott a “joke” this weekend after Abbott rightly pointed out that Pritzker’s state has practically gerrymandered the Republican Party out of existence. The inconvenient truth for Pritzker is that while Trump earned 44% of Illinois’s vote last November, just three — three — of its 17 House seats currently belong to Republicans.
“We held public hearings, legislative hearings,” said Pritzker. “People attended them. They spoke out. There was a map that was put out. There were actually changes made to the map. And a map was passed, and it was done at the end of the census, the decennial census. So that’s how it’s done in this country.”
So, you see: A map was put out, and changes were made to the map, and the map was passed. Whenever a politician overdoses on the passive voice, it’s because he’s on exceedingly weak ground.
Last, but certainly not least, I bring you James Carville, the grizzled gift that keeps on giving. On a recent podcast, he said that the Democrats “are just going to have to unilaterally add Puerto Rico and District of Columbia states,” adding, “They’re going to have to do it. They’re just going to have to do it. And they may have to expand the [Supreme Court] to 13 members.”
Which just goes to show: For the Democrats, it’s all about power. Nothing else matters. Not even the rules.
